Some Cautious Signs for Optimism

The economic news continues to be…not horrible. Today we learned that consumer confidence had its biggest jump in more than eight years.

New homes figures are still terrible, but they increased a tiny bit last month. Here’s an interesting fact I didn’t know: “Each home built creates an average of three jobs for a year and generates about $90,000 in tax revenue, according to the National Association of Home Builders.”

While initial jobless claims rose last week, that was up from a seven-month low.

The big news this week will be Friday’s jobs report. The unemployment rate is currently stuck at 9%. The economy has slowly added new jobs but it’s barely kept pace with the natural growth of the population. Wall Street’s forecast for the November jobs report is that the jobless rate will be at 9% and that the economy created 120,000 new jobs. For the last 10 months, the unemployment rate has bounced between 8.83% and 9.18%.

I’m also looking forward to Thursday’s ISM report. Wall Street expects a reading of 51.5 which isn’t strong but any reading above 50 means that the economy is expanding.

Posted by on November 29th, 2011 at 10:55 am


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